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Be Prepared ...for litigation. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Nobody likes seeing an institution like the Boy Scouts dragged into litigation. Especially over something as disturbing as child sexual abuse. But the very public data dump of "perversion files" that an Oregon judge authorized yesterday does represent one positive attribute of the U.S. legal system: It forces large institutions to rethink how they deal with problems that can affect thousands of individual victims.

"The value of these lawsuits is really not directed to any particular jury verdict or outcome," said Timothy Lytton, a professor at AlbanyLaw School who has written extensively about how litigation forced the Catholic Church to assume responsibility for its errant priests. "These lawsuits tend to frame the issue as an institutional problem, and not a personal problem involving a couple of bad apples."

There's a lot not to like about civil litigation. Facts are malleable in the hands of a good trial attorney, and juries are known to award outrageous damages -- over and over again -- to punish an institution and reward plaintiffs they feel sympathy for. If lawyers establish enough of a winning streak against the Boy Scouts, they could bankrupt a beloved American institution just as they forced several Catholic dioceses to file for protection.

The Boy Scouts, in a news release yesterday, said that while some of its responses to allegations of abuse were "plainly insufficient, inappropriate, or wrong," the group's efforts to identify abusers and remove them from the organization helped protect Scouts. The organization kept its files confidential in part to encourage people to come forward, the Boy Scouts said, and police were ultimately involved in 63% of the cases.

That may be, Lytton said, but the important thing about the ongoing litigation against the Scouts has been how the process brought the information to light. The Boy Scout files, which name more than 1,000 individuals suspected of abuse since the early 1960s, could do "with a second set of eyes," he said.

"The social good that comes out of it is, it reframes the issue to the adequacy of institutional responses to the problem," he said. "Until the Catholic Church litigation, nobody thought this had to do with the way the institution was structured."

Lytton wrote a book, "Holding Bishops Accountable," that serves as a case study for his theory that the messy U.S. litigation system helps the public by forcing private facts into the public eye. Public prosecutors aren't likely to go after institutions like the Catholic Church or the Boy Scouts, he said, and neither are local police. (Although prosecutors did send a shameful number of day-care employees to jail based on what later was revealed in many cases to be insufficient evidence.) Only after private litigators forced the public release of files showing how the church reassigned known pedophiles to new parishes did prosecutors indict bishops for their role in covering up the scandal, he said.

"Go after the Boy Scouts? It frankly sounds un-American," Lytton said. "People may or may not like trial attorneys, but one thing useful about them is they are not beholden to any constituency."

The lawyer who forced the public release of the Boy Scouts files probably won't win too many popularity contests. Kelly Clark won a $20 million verdict against the Scouts on behalf of six plaintiffs in 2010, and his website lists other areas of practice that include "Mormon abuse" and "orphanage/foster home abuse."

It's hard to judge now whether the Boy Scouts has a Catholic-level problem. The files released yesterday show, in excruciating detail, how the organization took in abuse complaints, investigated them, and placed suspected abusers on a "confidential list" barring them from future affiliation with the Scouts. Unlike the Catholic Church, it rarely allowed them to serve in other Scout troops and made no attempt to rehabilitate them.